Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries

Digital libraries, whether commercial, public or personal, lie at the heart of the information society. Yet, research into their long‐term viability and the meaningful accessibility of their contents remains in its infancy. In general, as we have pointed out elsewhere, ‘after more than twenty years of research in digital curation and preservation the actual theories, methods and technologies that can either foster or ensure digital longevity remain startlingly limited.’ Research led by DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) and the Digital Preservation Cluster of DELOS has allowed us to refine the key research challenges – theoretical, methodological and technological – that need attention by researchers in digital libraries during the coming five to ten years, if we are to ensure that the materials held in our emerging digital libraries are to remain sustainable, authentic, accessible and understandable over time. Building on this work and taking the theoretical framework of archival science as bedrock, this paper investigates digital preservation and its foundational role if digital libraries are to have long‐term viability at the centre of the global information society.

Critique of Architectures for Long-Term Digital Preservation

Evolving technology and fading human memory threaten the long-term intelligibility of many kinds of documents. Furthermore, some records are susceptible to improper alterations that make them untrustworthy. Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs) and Trustworthy Digital Objects (TDOs) seem to be the only broadly applicable digital preservation methodologies proposed. We argue that the TDR approach has shortfalls as a method for long-term digital preservation of sensitive information. Comparison of TDR and TDO methodologies suggests differentiating near-term preservation measures from what is needed for the long term. TDO methodology addresses these needs, providing for making digital documents durably intelligible. It uses EDP standards for a few file formats and XML structures for text documents. For other information formats, intelligibility is assured by using a virtual computer. To protect sensitive information—content whose inappropriate alteration might mislead its readers, the integrity and authenticity of each TDO is made testable by embedded public-key cryptographic message digests and signatures. Key authenticity is protected recursively in a social hierarchy. The proper focus for long-term preservation technology is signed packages that each combine a record collection with its metadata and that also bind context—Trustworthy Digital Objects.

Curating E-Mails; A life-cycle approach to the management and preservation of e-mail messages

E-mail forms the backbone of communications in many modern institutions and organisations and is a valuable type of organisational, cultural, and historical record. Successful management and preservation of valuable e-mail messages and collections is therefore vital if organisational accountability is to be achieved and historical or cultural memory retained for the future. This requires attention by all stakeholders across the entire life-cycle of the e-mail records. This instalment of the Digital Curation Manual reports on the several issues involved in managing and curating e-mail messages for both current and future use. Although there is no 'one-size-fits-all' solution, this instalment outlines a generic framework for e-mail curation and preservation, provides a summary of current approaches, and addresses the technical, organisational and cultural challenges to successful e-mail management and longer-term curation.

Managing UIC Medical Center Policies Using DSpace

The University of Illinois at Chicago’s University Archives found that using the DSpace institutional repository software is an effective, if not elegant, solution for the submission, search, and retrieval of a set of vital university records. This case study discusses the process of using the institutional repository to manage the University of Illinois Medical Center’s electronic policies and procedures documents

Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content

Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace. Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users. We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.

Long-Term Preservation of Digital Records, Part I: A Theoretical Basis

The Information Revolution is making preservation of digital records an urgent issue. Archivists have grappled with the question of how to achieve this for about 15 years. We focus on limitations to preservation, identifying precisely what can be preserved and what cannot. Our answer comes from the philosophical theory of knowledge, especially its discussion about the limits of what can be communicated. Philosophers have taught that answers to critical questions have been obscured by "failure to understand the logic of our language". We can clarify difficulties by paying extremely close attention to the meaning of words such as 'knowledge', 'information', 'the original', and 'dynamic'. What is valuable in transmitted and stored messages, and what should be preserved, is an abstraction, the pattern inherent in each transmitted and stored digital record. This answer has, in fact, been lurking just below the surface of archival literature. To make progress, archivists must collaborate with software engineers. Understanding perspectives across disciplinary boundaries will be needed.

Technical alignment

This essay discusses the importance of the areas of infrastructure and testing to help digital preservation services demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. It encourages practitioners to build a strong culture in which transparency and collaborations between technical frameworks are valued highly. It also argues for devising and applying agreed-upon metrics that will enable the systematic analysis of preservation infrastructure. The essay begins by defining technical infrastructure and testing in the digital preservation context, provides case studies that exemplify both progress and challenges for technical alignment in both areas, and concludes with suggestions for achieving greater degrees of technical alignment going forward

The Trend and Intellectual Structure of Digital Archives Research

Archives are an extremely valuable part of cultural heritage since they represent the trace of the activities of a juridical person or organization in the course of their business. Through various information technology (IT), tremendous amount of digital archives (DA) are created. These archives are the basis for providing evidence and knowledge in everlasting memory of human society. The management of digital archives becomes a fast growing field throughout last decade and introduces abundant articles in academia. However, their trend and intellectual structure have remained obscure in the research community. To map the trend and intellectual structure of DA research, this study identifies the high-impact articles as well as the correlations among these scholar publications. In this study, text mining techniques, such as co-word and cluster analysis, have been deployed to investigate the intellectual pillars of the DA literature. This study exposes researchers to a new way of profiling knowledge networks and their relationships in the research area of DA, thereby helping academia and practitioners better understand up-to-date studies. The results of the mapping can help identify the research direction of DA research, provide a valuable tool for researchers to access DA literature, and act as an exemplary model for future research